#1084 - Douglas Murray

Okay?

And we're live. Douglas, first of all, thanks for joining me. Appreciate it.

Great pleasure to be with you.

Looking forward to talking to you. You've become an example to me, or your conversation with Sam Harris has become an example to me of how squirrely things have gotten lately with the way people interpret conversations about ideas. This because of this. Jamie, pull that thing up. This is a tweet that someone sent out, and he got a strike. A community guideline strike just for listening, just for putting you on his playlist. A conversation between Sam Harris and you and this man. Or. I don't know if it's a man. I just assumed I'm a problem. I'm a part of the problem. Part of the patriarchy. Ptrkccx on Twitter. That is his screen name. His or her or Zur screen name on Twitter, and got a community guideline strike for just putting this now. I brought this up to. I was having dinner with some friends, one of them who used to work at Google, and someone who's there was a highly ranked person at YouTube. I brought this up, and the exact quote was, that was because it's hate speech. And I said, you said that so flippantly. I go, please tell me the contents of the conversation. Do you know what they talked about? I go, how did you say that? She goes, well, I'm sure if someone marked it as a community guideline or as a community strike. What is it called? A community guideline strike? Yeah, that there must be hate speech. I'm like, do you understand? This is Douglas Murray and Sam Harris. I bet that's not what the conversation was about.

I bet it wasn't too. I'm trying to think what we did talk about now, it's making me nervous. But I know it definitely wasn't hate speech by any sane definition of those words. This sort of thing is very disturbing to me.

Very disturbing.

And you notice it happening with other people, of course. And that's disturbing enough. It's more disturbing, of course, than it happens to you, but slightly surreal. I mean, I know Sam Harris a bit. Not a hateful person. My most sort of yogic, calm, blissed out, west coast of America friend. And I'm pretty amazed that anyone at Google or anywhere else would think that anything that could come out of his mouth with hate speech, unless you decided that hate speech is just anything you personally don't like or that words don't matter anymore.

Well, that's what I'm concerned about. I'm concerned that there's an agenda that people who work in these, we don't even have to name the organizations, but in certain organizations are extremely left leaning. And I mean, it's probably better than being extremely right leaning.

Sure.

It really is. It's probably better than them being white supremacist, white nationalist hate groups. It's probably far better that they're radical lefties. But it becomes a problem when you're doing things like that, because things like that limit free speech, and they limit the free discussion of ideas. I didn't listen to your conversation. I think I listened to a little bit of it, but I didn't listen to enough of it to know whether or not you guys started screaming out the n word halfway in.

I'm sure, I'm sure you would. I'm sure I would have heard about it blushing more. At this moment.

I had another thing that I talked about with this same person I brought up, Jordan Peterson, and there's issues with. Every time he's on podcast, the podcast get flagged for demonetization. And the exact words were, he's a troublemaker. And I'm like, what in the fuck are you talking about? Are you listening to his conversations? He is very articulate, and he's extremely careful going over these ideas that I think we should all be discussing. So to call this hate speech or to call someone a troublemaker, to me it symbolizes what we're dealing with today. This is a very strange time when it comes to communication and the people that regulate and distribute our communication, it is.

And whenever I've had a chance to speak with people in that kind of world, in that sort of role, the question I always want to ask, among other things, is, do you know where this is going to lead? Do you know what it's going to do if you keep breaking down definitions and terms and words? Do you know what happens, for instance, down the road if you keep on saying that Sam Harris and Douglas Murray having a conversation about something is hate speech, do you know what relief that's going to give other people down the road about what they're going to be able to get away with? This is what's being created all the time. At the moment, it seems to me this idea that you police the discussion along incredibly narrow lines that happen to surround your own comfort zone and call everything outside it, not just stuff I don't agree with or things that I would argue with or debate with, but hate speech is just, I think, very, very dangerous. Down the road, you can see exactly the trail that bit of gunpowder goes to.

I can. Where do you think it goes?

I think it goes to a point where people become cynical about any claims made about anyone. And the likelihood is that if 99 times you've seen Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, whoever called hate speech, then the hundredth time that somebody uses the term hate speech might be on somebody who is engaging in hate speech, and all your defenses are going to be down. You've got nothing. You're very likely to become. Very unlikely. Sorry to become skeptical and think, I'm really going to dig down. Most of us don't have time. We don't have time to find out every single thought and word that someone has uttered or thought. And so it seems very likely to me that down the road, very, very bad people are able to get through the gates because we kept on making erroneous claims frivolously for our own short term gain and for our own short term comfort, and we'll end up basically bringing the gates down completely.

I agree with you, and I think there's been a lot of discussion lately as well, that I agree with, where when you make these ridiculous claims about conversations, you actually empower radical people who oppose left wing ideology. They get more extreme. You empower the extremists because they know that you are incorrect. They have evidence of it. They see your ridiculous behavior. And the other really disturbing aspect of it is these are the people that are distributing speech. Think about how many discussions are viewed daily on YouTube. It's stunning.

Yeah. There's so much. I mean, we're at the beginning of this, aren't we? Because there's a long way for this to run, a long way for the censorship to run. You can't help thinking, among other things, that the people trying to make the rules at the moment have no idea of the fact that these debates have happened before.

Right.

Or have not bothered to look into them and seem to think that history started with them. And I just wish that, among other things, with social media, people realize we have been through this several times before, at least. And the lessons are pretty clear. They are not that you can limit speech in order to attain political nirvana, for instance, nor are they that you can simply use, as I say, for short term gain, accusations, you know, to be wrong in order to further a short term political goal. We know all this. We've been through it. Printing press, we went through it with John Stuart Mill. We went through it with Milton. I just wish these people had any idea of the fact that history started before their parents conceived them.

Well, the whole culture of tech today is such a progressive thought bubble. It's an echo chamber. And like I said, it's better that they're really progressive and open minded and left wing than radical right wing. I think it's better.

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, by radical right wing, you mean neo Nazi racist or something. Yeah, of course. Although these people have, as I say, all the ability to create those people, right? And empower and empower them, which is something you don't want actual racists and Nazis to have legitimate grievance claims, and you don't want them to be able to disguise themselves as something they're not. So I had a friend who, a lot of friends involved in the Northern Ireland conflict many years ago in the UK, not that many years ago, one writer had a beautiful phrase about it where you got to a stage where everyone was killing everyone. He said, you also got to a stage where truth was whatever you were having yourself. And we're not far away from that place where I say what you call is hate speech. You say what I say is hate speech. Let's call the whole thing off. We're not very far away from that, actually.

Yeah. It's very strange that this echo chamber is being so reinforced and that very few people are stepping out and saying, well, wait, let's take a look at this objectively. And the people that do do that are signaled